The Centre hosts a multi- and inter-disciplinary research programme, drawing particularly on economics, business and management studies and socio-legal studies. The main focus of research activities addresses three basic questions:
What are the effects of taxes on business behaviour?
What are the effects of business behaviour on social welfare?
How do, and should, governments design and administer business taxes?
We also undertake research on a number of other related issues.
Our research aims to make an original and substantial contribution to the understanding of these questions. The research uses a variety of techniques, both theoretical and empirical.
Each of these broad research programmes contains a number of individual projects. The projects listed in these pages are in various states of completion. Some have been completed and have been published as CBT working papers, or in other publications such as academic journals. Links are provided to all outputs from each project. Other projects are still in progress and as yet have no published output.
Data
A key feature of much of our research is the use of detailed microeconomic data. Typically this originates from company accounting records, combined with information on company ownership. We use publicly available datasets AMADEAUS, ORBIS and ZEPHYR from Bureau van Dijk, and DATASTREAM from Thomson Reuters. We also use microeconomic data from the UK Office of National Statistics, and we have been given access to confidential company tax return data by the HMRC.
In addition, we have also collected from several sources a large dataset on the business tax systems in a number of countries, and over a number of years. We have also undertaken our own surveys, primarily of UK businesses.